Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class by Mark Lause (review)

Mark Lause, the author of several previous books on labor and the Civil War, fills a significant gap in labor history by narrating the experience of the American working class during the war. Unlike generations of early labor historians, who contended that the war distracted American workers from their own struggles and organizing, he details a rich history of labor activism during and in the aftermath of the Civil War. Lause argues instead, drawing inspiration from E. P. Thompson’s classic The Making of the English Working Class, that “the Civil War proved central to the making of the American working class” (ix).

There were over a million American workers on the eve of the war, some of whom had developed a tradition of organizing through skilled trade unions and short-lived working men’s parties. According to Lause, many workers and union leaders carried their traditions of labor activism into the Union army, and even as old organizations died out, new traditions of working-class actions were born during the war. But Lause rarely defines his argument or terms, and one is left wondering what version of “free labor” workers espoused. They were critical of “wage slavery,” and most of the leading unionists seemed to have viewed proslavery secessionists as espousing a “horrifically anti-labor vision of their future in North America” (27). Nonetheless, Lause tells us too little about the distinctive free-labor vision of American workers—or its overlap with abolition, Fourierism, and land reform—except for a few sentences that remain tantalizingly suggestive. One wishes he had drawn from his own previous work to develop a more robust account of Northern workers’ radical free-labor ideology.

Nonetheless, Lause must be commended for his painstaking research, which highlights the role of labor in the war by tracing individual figures and unionists enrolled in the Union army and wartime strikes. At times this seems like extensive cataloging, but he is able to sustain his argument that the Civil War, unlike any other major war in American history, was a working man’s war. He unearths interesting and forgotten figures like Alonzo Draper, a leading antislavery unionist and journalist from Lynn, Massachusetts, who would go on to command a black regiment during the war. Draper made sure that his men, asked to give way to white troops, would be the first to march into Richmond with the fall of the Confederacy by quick-stepping them across fields into the city. Lause’s most extensive documentation comes from the National Typographical Union, which sent over a hundred members to fight at Gettysburg.

Citing another historian, Lause also claims that Abraham Lincoln’s record on labor was “unmatched in American history,” despite his administration’s neutrality on most strikes during the war (154). He twice quotes Lincoln saying that he is glad to live in a society where labor can strike, but gives no sustained analysis of Lincoln’s views of free labor and social mobility. One wonders why Lause does not discuss Lincoln’s remarkable annual message to Congress in 1861, in which he laid out his position on labor and capital with great clarity.

Lause must be credited, though, for developing a broad definition of the American working class by devoting a chapter to the “Great Slave Strike” during the Civil War, which helped bring about the downfall of slavery. Here he, like many other historians of the war and emancipation, borrows W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of the “general strike” of the enslaved during the war and his insistence that the slave must be viewed as “the black worker.” Another chapter on the emergence of Working Women’s Relief Associations during the war, oddly titled “The Survival of Moral Suasion,” reveals that women workers were just as prone to labor militancy and strikes as men. But again, Lause does little...